My hand’s a paw

My right hand. I awoke this morning to realize it was a slightly swollen, somewhat painful thing hanging from my wrist – looking sort of like a paw, but not a cute, furry one. Soooooo I think this morning I will get cleaned up and go over to the nursing home and see Kathryn. (I have already taken quick acting aspirin crystals.)  Then I will come home and if the things have come around, attach myself to the sander again.

Today is Quentin’s birthday – July 6th. That was actually the start of a tension-filled week: The morning after he was born, the doctor came in and said his right eye was all red, as in “filled with blood” red, and he was calling in an ophthalmologist. Well, he did and that fellow got him an appointment with the head of the eye department at the University of Illinois in Chicago. You have to have a special “ticket” to go to the head of the line like that.

So I came home and then we brought Quentin home because, as the nurse explained, he would be breaking the sterile field of the nursery to go to the University anyway. It was quite a day, from Dr. Morton Goldberg’s resident asking me, “Has anyone in  your family had an eye removed?” to Dr. Goldberg himself getting down on his knees to put drops in Quentin’s eyes so he wouldn’t have to be moved off his dad’s lap, to the giant microscope coming down out of the ceiling, to the room filling up with ophthalmology people, to Dr. Goldberg saying, “Well, I don’t see a tumor.” The sudden lightening mood of the medical personnel slapped me in the face with an ‘Oh my God, they were thinking tumor, but it isn’t’ moment.

We walked out of the room and Dr. Goldberg asked me how I was. I answered fine and then went into the waiting room, looked at our friend who had driven us, and burst into sobs while gasping out, “He’s okay.”

And then Quentin came home.

That was 28 years ago. Now, today, my paw and I will be sanding the kitchen floor. But if I were in hot, hot Houston, I would get him a cake . . . and eat some, too. I think my paw could handle a fork.